By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

In the last five hundred years or so, the English language has undergoneremarkable geographical expansion, bringing it into contact with otherlanguages in new locations. It also caused different regional dialects ofthe language to come into contact with each other in colonial situations.This book is made up of a number of fascinating tales ofhistorical-sociolinguistic detection. These are stories of origins – of aparticular variety of English or linguistic feature – which together tell acompelling general story.

In each case, Trudgill presents an intriguing puzzle, locates and examinesthe evidence, detects clues that unravel the mystery, and finally proposesa solution. The solutions are all original, often surprising, sometimeshighly controversial. Providing a unique insight into how language contactshapes varieties of English, this entertaining yet rigorous account will bewelcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, sociolinguistics andhistorical linguistics.